User blog:Historyfan15/The Origins/Behind the Scenes of Old vs. New
From Humble Beginnings Back in September of 2014, I met my partner during gym in 9th grade of Webster Thomas High School. When we were partnered up for a ball game, I brought up the subject of modern television and how skewed I thought modern cartoons were. To my surprise, my partner, Shadow Garth, agreed with me and even added his own input on the subject. From that point onward, we talk continously during gym and we eventually became coming up with the idea for Old vs. New. "Toon City" and Original Premise Originally, I thought of the name for the series to be called "Toon City." However, considering this was the main location for the series, Garth suggested a different name and eventually, we settled on the name "Old vs. New." The original premise for the series was to have the Classic Cartoons compete against the Modern Cartoons for business under the leaderships of Mr. Johnson for the Classics and Mr. Stanford for the Moderns. At the time, I was basing a lot of the series' elements off the show "TUGS." In fact, a lot of the episodes for "Season 1" were derived from TUGS episodes and the TUGS Audio Productions. I even had a instance where I derived elements from "Crossed Lines", a series by Halfbakedhex8. But after a year or so, I began to feel that I was plagiarising both the works of TUGS and Crossed Lines and thus the characters of Johnson and Stanford were eventually dropped and I immediately went back to the drawing board and began constructing more of my own ideas and Garth's ideas. Characters The characters have always been the biggest thing to balance out in the series. Originally, I was going to try and divide the character usage and story arcs by different seasons. The main story arc in Season 1 focused on Mordecai and Rigby and this would eventually play into the first "movie"; The Battle for Toon City. For the second season, Garth insisted that the focus be centered on both Samurai Jack and the Crystal Gems and for Season 3, I was hoping to focus more on the Hanna Barbera characters and other Classic Toons. In addition, the characters that were vehicles, such as the characters from both "Thomas and Friends" and "TUGS" were merely going to be background characters, but I eventually decided to try and incorporate them into the stories. At one point, I was considering bringing in the "British Railway Series" characters by Simierski, but I eventually decided against it because I thought it would be disrespectful to his original work and that the characters wouldn't really fit in the universe. Eventually, I decided to drop the TUGS characters as well because I couldn't find a lot of good usage out of them, considering a lot of the story ideas we had come up with primarily took place on land. Soon, that left the Thomas characters as the only sentient vehicle characters and during planning of Season 3, I decided to give them a massive shift in usage and made them prominent characters of the cast. As for Garth, he became to incorporate his own characters known as the "Dimension Lords" and have them be utilized in a number of situations. However, it was at this point where more complications became to arise. My Series, Your Series, Our Series? With the Dimension Lords taking a lot of the focus on Old vs. New, it left a lot of my ideas for charcter usage to be downplayed. Eventually, I decided to speak about this to Garth and we began to try and mesh both of our ideas together. One of the instances where we combined both of our ideas together was a story involved a "Mad Bomber" wreaking havoc on Toon City and I'm very satisfied in the direction that story went. Characters: Part 2 In 2017, we began thinking of introducing more than just TV characters into the series. The first idea that popped into my mind was including the Star Fox characters and developing a story surrounding the return of Andross. In addition, I also have plans for another Star Fox story for this series involving the Aparoids. One thing that I'm glad was accomplished was the reformation of Geoffrey St. John. Given how I like to bridge the gaps between events that have happened in television/comics/video games, me and Garth discussed the idea and played out the events during a Discord call. The Great Toon Show This has probably been my favorite idea to incorporate in the series. Based off the Olympics, "Laff-a-Lypmics", and "The Great Race", this is a yearly event where the characters engage in athletic and miscellaneous events to win the Championship Gold Metal. In 2019, as a tribute to Super Smash Bros Ultimate, me and Garth decided to create a similar format to that of the popular game and incorporate it in the Great Toon Show of 2019. The End of an Era? In recent times, contacts between myself and Garth have become a lot less frequent. Given how both our lives have changed since going off to college, we've been having long periods of time where we aren't engaging in conversation. I'm hoping that maybe sometime in the future, me and Garth can go back to talking and storyboarding like we used to. Revamp? Recently, I have started a new take on Old vs. New and incorporating quite a few of my original ideas into it. The first episode that I have written is called "Knuckles" and I am happy to finally be making my series into a reality for others to see. It's been five long years since the idea for this series came to be and I have quite a few ideas in store for the series as well. But I am willing to hear any suggestions that people might have for the series. To anyone that sees this, thank you for reading and have a wonderful day. Category:Blog posts